


moonlighting

by annuska



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: (until the finale of course), Canon Tie-in, F/F, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied Relationships, Spoilers, umbrastaff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-26 23:50:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21109220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annuska/pseuds/annuska
Summary: Lucretia knew the day would come. She knew they'd cross paths eventually. She thought she was ready.She wasn't.(Implied Lup/Lucretia but not the overarching theme--you can read it as friendship, if you want.)





	moonlighting

No matter how much she’d anticipated the day, she isn’t ready when it finally comes.

Her heart clenches at the sight of them, but she keeps her composure. She remains calm through it all: regarding them as strangers, seeing the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet again, putting on a show of destroying it. Her chest constricts, but something bubbles up inside of her, too, and she can’t help but let a smile out the longer they talk. She’s missed them and here they are. She’s fine. She’s prepared years for this.

Or so she thinks, until—

“Do you know anything about this umbrella?” Magnus asks, gesturing to Taako, who in turn pulls his beautiful blue cape back to reveal a plain red umbrella. Merle, dear sweet Merle, stands to the side, nodding.

And that is the moment she realizes that she will never be ready.

Lucretia will never be ready to face the reality of all that had led up to this day, but she steadies her shaking arms, reaching over for the umbrella—gingerly, at first, as if touching it would burn her—but she takes it, examines it, looks it over, as if all the while it isn’t burning her from the _inside _rather than on the surface of her fingertips.

She knows _everything_ about this umbrella.

She knows, once upon a time, it belonged to Lup. Lupita. Her beautiful, fiery Lupita. It was Lup’s beloved umbrastaff, her weapon of choice so many cycles ago, so many worlds ago, when they’d first learned how to artifice. It, much like Lup, was bold but unassuming—until it sprawled open, releasing its passion and justice upon the world. She knew that it had long lay dormant, but could be reawakened by an adept magic user. An adept magic user like Taako—her twin brother.

“No,” she lies, heart aching, “but the artificer might.” She implies her hired artificer, but it isn’t the one she means at all.

It takes everything in her not to dismiss them and poor Davenport, to turn them all away and lock herself away in her office and—and no, she can’t. She reminds herself that anyone, anyone at all, could have found the staff but by some stroke of luck or fate, it was Taako. There was no one in the world better to have Lup’s umbrella than he.

But if he had the staff, where was _she_?

The word _dead_ flashes through Lucretia’s mind, and try as she might to toss the thought away, it rushes back full force, pulling in its undertow: _a fate worse than death_. Because even if she were dead, she was a lich, she could return in spirit—but there’d been no sign of her for over a decade. Just like there’d been no sign of Barry. But Lup—oh, Lup…

Now there’s the umbrella and still, Lup is gone.

The miserable train of thoughts passes by within a fraction of a second, such a blur to process in such little time, but despite the pounding headache it leaves her with, she’s thankful for its departure. The aftereffects are rattling her insides, knocking her stomach and her heart and her lungs about carelessly, but she can’t be weak: she’s become a lion-hearted woman, after all.

She had to. She’s the One.

Once, what felt like a lifetime ago, there were Seven but Two had been lost so now it was just the Five, except she was the only one who _knew_, the only one who _remembered_, so really, it was just her, _The One_. The only one who had ever known Loneliness the way she had, the only one who had lived through a hundred years of interstellar, interdimensional, interplanetary life with six people who came to mean—

not the world to her, no, because she’s seen more worlds end than survive, and a world meant nothing in the grand scheme of things—no, not the world, but the _universe_, every _plane_, all of _existence _to her—

only to lose them all.

And to be the only One to remember.

And now, as she listens to these people that she loves so dearly laughing and joking and playing their accomplishments and abilities down, she remains stoic and stone faced, but she feels it returning: the creeping loneliness she’s fought an entire decade to suppress, to will out of existence until she can make it all right.

She never was a woman of action, not until the year she spent alone, fearing it would be their last, and then fearing it would happen again, and gods, it _did_—but she had to be, because writing would change nothing now. She has to be Madam Director. She has to look into Magnus and Merle and Taako’s eyes again, now as a complete stranger, has to look at that god damn umbrella, the most searing reminder of her fiery love, likely lost for an eternity, and she had to stand tall and stoic.

And so, rather than dismissing the three of them and poor Davenport and turning them all away and locking herself in her office, she tells them instead her fantastical almost-made-up tale of the wizards and warlocks (but really, the wizards and fighter and cleric and a starship’s captain) who were unable to contain their powers or the items they unleashed upon the world, she lies about finding the Voidfish within the last year, and she offers the three of her very best friends a job under herself, knowing full well that she’s going against every promise she once made to them to keep them safe and away from the danger they—and she—created. It’s the only way now.

She taps her plain white oak staff against the floor and watches the three of them fall unconscious before her, and she beckons Davenport to have them situated inside of the initiation room, and asks him to leave her to prepare. She watches her guard carry them off, Merle and Magnus and Taako, and Taako’s cape slides off his side, revealing once again the umbrastaff—and despite her lion-heartedness, despite all her efforts, it’s that god damn umbrella.

And in an empty throne room, Lucretia drops her artifact, falls to her knees, a hand over her stomach and one over her mouth—

and Madam Director cries.


End file.
